Digging in to clean up our dirty waters

Tuesday

Anamarija Frankic is on something of a crusade to turn the urban coastline and watersheds in and around Boston into a beacon of environmental health.

She fled bombs, bullets and concentration camps in the former Yugoslavia almost 20 years ago.

Now, Anamarija Frankic is on something of a crusade to turn the urban coastline and watersheds in and around Boston into a beacon of environmental health.

“If I’m not even safe to go boating in some parts of the Neponset (River), that cannot be good,” said Frankic, who is Croatian and an assistant professor of coastal ecosystem management at UMass-Boston. “Yes, it’s an urban river, but why should it be polluted?”

A new resident of the Squantum peninsula in Quincy, Frankic can rattle off data about PCBs in the sediment and bacteria counts in the water, but that’s not really where her gospel catches fire. She’s more doer than policy wonk.

In one week alone this summer, she boarded a boat at the UMass docks that pumped 1,500 gallons of sewage from pleasure boats in Marina Bay, planted clam seeds at Thompson Island and led 14 environmentally minded teenagers from Hyde Park on a canoe trip down the Neponset – all of it as a volunteer.

“I think it’s important to be engaged where you are. Applied science is something we are missing,” she said. “I strongly believe we have solutions to every single environmental problem.”

While many environmentalists are doomsayers, Frankic effuses optimism. Perhaps it’s a trait that springs from her experience as a refugee, someone given another chance while others she knew weren’t nearly so fortunate.

The war broke out near where she worked as an ecologist at Plitvice Lakes National Park.

“We were driving one way while the (Serbian) army was coming the other way. You’re trying not to be bombed and shot,” she said. “A lot of my friends ended up in the concentration camps, the rape camps. It was horrible, and then you feel guilty because you escaped.”

She immigrated to America in 1994 on a fellowship from the College of William and Mary in Virginia to earn her doctorate degree, but didn’t feel at home in the United States until she came to Boston.

“It’s the ocean,” she said. “Just put me on the ocean, and I’m really happy.”

But the ocean to which Frankic gravitates is not really the one that most people conjure up – some distant ocean connected to a beach on vacation.

She prefers the one you can see from Quincy, the glimpses from Interstate 93 – the ocean that washes up on an urban landscape.

“If we’re only happy when we’re tourists in some pristine places, then there’s something wrong,” Frankic said. “We take it for granted that our harbors should be brown, filthy and stinky.”

She heads up Green Boston Harbor Project at UMass-Boston whose goal is to create “a harbor that lives within ecological and human limits.” It would be the world’s first such urban harbor, Frankic said.

The effort goes beyond just prohibiting the release of treated or untreated sewage from boats in the harbor. Her students monitor for marine invasive species and collect water and plankton samples.

And Frankic envisions an urban waterfront through a historical lens, wanting to resurrect a time when Quincy Bay and Boston Harbor teemed with shellfish.

“We need to try to bring back three key habitats: the salt marsh, the mud flats with shellfish beds and the eel grass,” she said.

“They have to be restored together because they coexist together in nature,” she added, stressing the word “together.” “If we can, we’ll have a success story. We can swim from there. We can eat from there.”

The canoe trip on the lower Neponset River plays a role, too. She wants the teenagers to experience nature firsthand, to see the trash and debris piled on the riverbanks and help to test water from outfall pipes for coliform bacteria.

As Frankic and youth workers in Hyde Park planned the trip, program director Pat Alvarez asked Frankic how to help teenagers grapple with the enormous issue of pollution.

“What can our kids do to help?” she asked. “Our kids were so depressed last year.”

Frankic said that the teens should be encouraged also to see what’s beautiful on the river, but the goal should be empowerment, not resignation.

“Give them an opportunity to bring their own ideas,” she said. “Ask them, what would you do if you were in power? How would you do it?”

Christopher Burrell may be reached at cburrell@ledger.com.

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